Clean Energy Requires Rare Metals. Should We Mine the Ocean Floor to Get Them?
There really is no such thing as a free lunch. We do understand the impact of oil and gas exploration, production and use in our current environment. There are impacts, there are side effects, but we know them, can calculate them, can mitigate them, know how to live with them without destroying every last piece of planetary real estate. And we also master the economic side of oil and gas. What we do not master at all is the consequences of a major shift towards renewable energy which we come to understand more and more is not so clean at all. Entire regions shred their airborne lifeforms to pieces, plaster everything they can find with beryllium panels, expose man and animal to infrasound waves, and don’t even provide us with economic, dependable energy. And now we are going to rip up the seafloor shredding entire ecosystems for the sake of a craze that’s destined to bankrupt the planet so that some investors can strike it rich. The sky is the limit – or maybe not.
Our need for metals runs deep. How deep, you might ask? Why, up to 16,000 feet deep, in the form of potato-sized lumps of metal lying on the seafloor in some of the deepest parts of the oceans.
